Idiots, hypocrites, protests and British politicians

11 October 2025

Enough stuff has been happening recently to inspire me to hoick out another sheet of vellum, extract a quill from the bum of a passing goose, and scratch away at some more mutterings.

In the first year of his second presidency, Trump’s own online and onstage performances have become so deranged that Madeleine Dean, a Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania, told the Republican house speaker Mike Johnson “The president is unhinged. He is unwell.”  

Johnson’s response was “Well a lot of folks on your side are too”.  Or, in English, “So the person with his finger on the button has dementia?  A lot of powerless people on your side also have dementia” (or, in everyday language, “My dog can fart louder than your dog.”)

The other thing that spurred me to action was the murder of Charlie Kirk on 10 September. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who hadn’t heard of him until he was shot but he seems to have been one of the spittle-spouting bigots from the less-humane end of America’s Republican party.

Reactions across the political spectrum were predictable:  right-wingers were incensed that people on the left would do this;  left-wingers were appalled that the killer claimed to be on their side. 

Whether or not I believe Kirk should be canonised is unimportant (although ‘Saint Charlie’ does have a certain ring to it …)  What is important is that I believe nobody has any right to kill anybody else because they don’t share the same political or religious beliefs (or for any other reason).

Then, in Manchester, a British terrorist attacked a synagogue, killing and wounding several people before he was himself shot dead by the police.

This produced an immediate response from one of the world’s biggest hypocrites, Benjamin Netanyahu, who said “Israel grieves with the Jewish community in the UK after the barbaric terror attack in Manchester.”  Followed by which he ordered more barbaric terror attacks on the remaining Palestinians he hasn’t already murdered.  By the end of July, he’d succeeded in killing 18,457 children according to an official list of named victims accepted as accurate by the international community, the UN and Israel’s military (but not Israeli politicians!)

A 27^th ceasefire* and exchange of hostages has since been agreed but we’ll see how long that lasts.  Two hours after the new ceasefire came into effect, Israeli tanks opened fire on Palestinians but their troops subsequently withdrew to new, agreed positions.

Last weekend saw a demonstration in London organised by Defend Our Juries to protest against the banning of Palestine Action, a UK network set up in 2020, “committed to ending global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime”.  The ban adds it to a list of more than 80 groups of international political movements with armed wings, like Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as armed groups like ISIS/ISIL, al-Qaeda and Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan.

Some of Palestine Action’s members are certainly guilty of causing criminal damage but it doesn’t have an armed wing and this protest was about the banning of a UK group whose members are opposed to the government’s continuing support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.  One demonstrator was cautioned and nearly arrested by the police for holding up a sign.  As they were about to carry him off, he suggested they read what his sign said:  “I oppose genocide – I support plasticine action”, in big, bold capitals.

The police laughed and left him.

The organisers were hoping to beat the arrest record set by a peaceful CND demonstration in 1961 but, with my help, they didn’t quite make it (I was there in 1961, I was arrested and fined £1, which seemed a fair price for a night’s accommodation, a good breakfast in Balham nick and luxury coach transport to Marylebone Court, followed by which I went back to school for the afternoon).

The demonstration was held on the same day as the Peckham Conker Championships in south London.  Isn’t it nice to have a choice of events to attend.

There’s a great shortlist for Idiot of the Month with Trump telling other countries what to do, Robert Jenrick complaining that Birmingham isn’t the sort of place he’d want to live in because he was there for 40 minutes and didn’t see a white face, goody bags at the Conservative Party Conference containing some chocolate with Kemi Badenoch’s signature printed on the wrapper under the words “When Labour negotiates, Britian loses”.

As fascinating as ever is the continuing fragmentation of the British political system.  For as long as I can remember, the government of Great Britain has been controlled or overseen by Conservatives on the right and Labour on the left, with a few Liberals and others somewhere in the middle. 

Now both the Conservative and Labour parties appear to be floundering in the wake of their unimpressive leaders while Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is attracting so many people disenchanted by the other parties that there’s a very real risk he could be Britain’s next prime minister.  Farage thinks teachers would immediately go on strike if he were elected because he’s accused them of “poisoning our kids” by telling them that black children are victims and white children oppressors – now there’s an unbrilliant reason to vote for him.

But he’s still the best at public speaking if you don’t listen too closely to what he’s saying but his only loyalty is to himself and he only became an MP for the first time last year (his 27^th attempt* for 27 different parties*).

By the way, this blog’s by-line is “a thing of shreds and patches”.  One reader who is clearly much more learned than I am has pointed out my quotation from The Mikado was actually adapted by Sir William Schwenck Gilbert from Shakespeare:  Hamlet describes his murderous and usurping uncle as ‘a king of shreds and patches’. 

*          I exaggerate …

Exploding pagers, twisted minds, Ig Nobel prizes, Atlantis and the climate crisis

21 September 2024

Tuesday’s simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah killed dozens of people and injured thousands more.  Israel seems a likely suspect but hasn’t yet accepted the blame.

In order to carry out this attack, small amounts of an explosive would have been added to each of the units with some sort of trigger device.  Their manufacture involves components and assembly lines in many different places and, because similar devices used by other people didn’t explode, it seems probable they were doctored after Hezbollah had acquired them but before they were distributed to their operatives.  Perhaps they were delivered to Hezbollah by a transport company called Mossad Logistics.

The whole thing was made even more sadistic by introducing a few seconds’ delay between the beep and the explosion to give people time to lift the device to their ear so it was more likely to explode next to their head.

It also needed somebody to make the decision when to press the button that would set them all off and 3.30pm local time seems a particularly cruel time to do this because so many people would have been in streets and markets, surrounded by innocent women and children.  What sort of twisted mind do people need to plan this, or implant the explosives, or to send the trigger code?

Other twisted minds belong to Mohammed Fayed (the ‘al’ was self-awarded) because it turns out he was the screw specialist in Harrods’ hardware department, and Elon Musk, now thought likely to become the world’s first trillionaire (why does my stomach turn over as I write that?)  Musk obviously feels threatened by the singer Taylor Swift because, after she came out as pro-Kamala Harris, he tweeted “Fine Taylor, you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

Isn’t this assault which, at least in English law, can be threats without physical contact?

Curiously enough, yet another mind with faulty connections posted this ‘first’ message (not in response to anything) last week on our local Nextdoor network:  “What’s happened was no bugger no apart from the boats working dollars sign’s on them and they are budgeting for the luxury toilets rolls lolx” (I’ve redacted the name of the sender for obvious reasons but I did wonder if lolx was a misprint for bolx). 

Which naturally leads to the announcement of this year’s winner of Ig Nobel prizes.  The awards were first introduced in 1991 and prizes are awarded to those who, in the opinion of the judges, highlight some of the quirkiest projects reported during the year.  Winners receive an award and 100 trillion dollars.  The only slight disappointment for the winners is that the dollars are not USD but Zimbabwean dollars with a value of about 40 cents.

The value of the researches considered can be judged from last year’s prize for medicine which was given to Christine Pham and Bobak Hedayati who pulled the hairs out of people’s nostrils to see if there are an equal number of hairs in each one.  Before you start squirming, you should know that they probed cadavers’ noses.  (Imagine having to ask relatives if it would be OK to pull all the hairs out their late grandfather’s nose.)

This year, prizewinning research included one project carried out by James Liao at the University of Florida who investigated the swimming abilities of a dead trout and a Swiss, German and Belgian group which demonstrated that placebos used in clinical trials are more effective if they cause pain or other unpleasant side-effects.

Japanese scientists also investigated whether oxygen pumped into the bums of mice, rats and pigs would help with respiratory problems by supplementing the oxygen absorbed from normal breathing.  This was inspired by a different study that had discovered loaches can use their intestines to breathe; yes, I too had to look them up – they are of course benthic or bottom-dwelling (geddit?) freshwater fish.

As far as I know, the study didn’t include any increase in the emission of inflammable farts but there is more logic to the idea than is obvious at first sight:  some medicines are given as suppositories rather than pills – more commonly I believe in France than Britain – and are absorbed through the walls of the rectum.  So why not oxygen?  There must be a way of producing an oxygen-rich solid that will stay in place long enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream.

A trial is now taking place with human volunteers with respiratory problems so, if you’ve got asthma and go for an annual check-up, don’t turn your back.

What wasn’t considered for a prize was the latest claim for the site of Atlantis.  The legend is attributed to Plato but its fate seems similar to that of Sodom and Gomorrah as written in the Talmud and later incorporated into the Bible.  All were destroyed by God(s) because their peoples were enjoying themselves (I oversimplify slightly here).  The cities were just destroyed but the island (?) of Atlantis sank under the sea and some people think its ruins are still out there somewhere.

Researchers have recently found an undersea mountain and some people believe this is it.  It’s a huge mountain rising from the seabed north of the Canary Islands that sank millions of years ago leaving its peak thousands of feet underwater.  Anybody worried about the different timescales involved, join the club.

A more recent landslip occurred in Greenland this time last year when the top 25m cubic metres of a 1,200-metre mountain collapsed and slid down into the twisty fjord below, triggering a huge tsunami.  This dissipated quickly but water continued to slosh around for more than a week because it was almost entirely contained within in the fjord by a sharp bend 10km downstream.

68 scientists from 40 institutions around the world who combined seismic data, field measurements, on-the-ground and satellite imagery, and high-resolution computer simulations of tsunami waves took a year to work out how the entire Earth had continued to vibrate for nine days.

The mountain collapsed because so much of the glacier in the fjord below had melted there was no longer enough left to support the mountain.  Global warming?  Utter piffle.